We are happy to announce that we have added the capability for bot admins to receive in-bot payments worldwide. Stripe Worldwide Payments is different from Messenger Native Payments that Facebook released not long ago. This new functionality is something that we have developed specifically for our platform to allow our bot creators to accept payments easily all over the world.

? Actual buying process with Stripe Wolrd Wide Payment Webview

Below are the highlights of what Stripe Worldwide Payments offers to our bot admins:
Stripe Worldwide Payments functionality is interchangeable with Facebook Native Payments in Chatfuel’s dashboard. This means that a bot admin can be switching seamlessly between either system, and payment screens that users see under either option look stylistically similar.

Bot makers in countries where Stripe works can accept payments from anywhere in the world.

Effortless application and connection process. You can be testing the functionality and accepting payments in your bot in a matter of minutes.

Once a user has entered their payment details in a given bot, they are saved in Stripe’s secure system and will be prefilled next time the same user wants to pay for something else.

Chatfuel does not store any payment details. All of the sensitive data is passed securely to Stripe, where it is stored.

To connect Stripe Worldwide Payments, log in to your dashboard at chatfuel.com and launch a wizard under the “Configure” tab in your bot. You will be in bot commerce business in no time!

As announced at F8, Messenger has begun rolling out its new Discover tab to all users. Submit your bot to appear under the Discover tab right now to pass through review without delay. Also, we would like to share with you some highlights from F8.

Submit your bot to Discover tab

Discover tab is a new section in Messenger located within 1 tap from Messenger’s home screen. We expect bots to get a significant number of new users from appearing under this tab. But before your bot can be shown there, it needs to pass Facebook’s review process.

Submitting your bot for review is easy – you can do it in less than 5 minutes. Needless to say, we recommend that you do it today. Click here to submit your bot.

You can also check out the FAQ from the Messenger team about the Discover tab.

F8

Our team had an honor and a privilege to be a part of Facebook’s F8 conference this year. We spent two days meeting wonderful people, learning and sharing great experiences, and being at the heart of innovation in our field. At this year’s conference, a number of chatbots built on Chatfuel were prominently featured during the opening keynote and various presentations – Ryan Leslie, Azkarbot, Golden State Warriors, T-Mobile, Epytom, Brew the Way, TechCrunch and ABC News. Take a look at this 1- minute summary video.

We are extremely grateful for and proud of all the bot creators who use our platform to build world-class conversational experiences. Thank you for being with us! Chatfuel is powered by all of you! ❤️ ? ?

And thank you to all our partners and friends at Facebook for making this a reality!

We’ve released full support for the new Persistent Menu from last week’s Facebook update. You can now create nested menu levels and disable free-form text input. Also, we’ve added a huge update to the User Attributes that allows you to segment users based on their name, user ID or geographic coordinates.

New Persistent Menu

The new Persistent Menu from last week’s Facebook update allows you to:

Create localized menus for users with different locales (that are set up in the user’s phone settings).

Templates

As you may have noticed, we’ve revamped our templates section. Now both new and advanced users can get maximum value out of it.

We believe that one of the best ways of learning is by example. With that in mind, we encourage you to share your own best templates with our community. For example, we are currently looking for the following:

After looking at over 15 Billion Messages, talking with many of the top analytics companies, strategic partners, as well as looking at Chatfuel’s internal data we have been able to narrow down the characteristics of good design vs bad design.

Often times bot creators make a number of critical errors when designing their bot. In some cases, they might have a great use case, a good user experience but because of a few design errors, the entire experience falls apart. It can be like having an awesome meal with an old wine. Such nuances, can literally make or break your bot.

After looking at the data, we noticed that it naturally fell into 3 categories: critical problems, things users want, and major areas of opportunity. Features were ranked based on severity and frequency and color coded. Our hope is that we can begin checking off these errors and adding new ones as bot makers read this and improve their bots. For this reason, this will be a living document! You should save and reference this often as it will change, as bots change.

3 Types of Problems

General usability problems fall into 3 categories:

RED = Critical Features your Bot Must Have
Some of these are obvious, however they happen with such frequency that we had no choice but to add them. You should start here and move down the list. If you have any RED/Critical errors, you should address them right away!

Orange = Important Features Users Want
This is the next most important category… These are features users want which will dramatically improve your bots user experience. Look at your data and begin addressing these issues based on your particular situation.

Green = Features Users will Love
This is where you beat your top competitors! The nuance is here and the opportunity to really have a good bot starts here. Your goal, your aim should always be to delight your users.

Evolution of this Document

Over the past year bots have evolved in a major way. Just think about all of the features Facebook alone has added. In the near future many more new features and abilities will be added to bots. As bots evolve and get better over time, this document will also evolve to reflect the reality. We expect that this document will be completely different in a few months.

Leave Comments

This document is a living document and you are welcome to make comments, ask & answer questions and share insights within the doc. If you have any topic suggestions or areas of concern, please do so in the comments below and we will take a look!

This will be an awesome way to learn and interact with the community and meet other bot developers.

Here is the Doc:

Christmas is almost here! We have several gifts for you. Hopefully you will like them.

New analytics

We are happy to introduce the newly-revised version of the analytics module. From now on you are able to:

select the time period;

see how many of your users still subscribed to your bot;

see daily gain and loss of users;

see daily active audience.

Also note that we have changed the definition of active user. We no longer count as active those users who received the broadcast, but didn’t read it.

Go to Block plugin

From now on you can create quizzes, personalize sections of your bot (different experiences for different user groups), lead users to a random block, and much, much more. To sum it up, this new plugin enables you to create far more flexible and complex chatbot experiences than ever before.

Audio and Video plugins

Increase your bot’s engagement by using embedded audio and video right in the Messenger.

Chatbot entry points

Previously each bot had only one link, which lead to the single Welcome message. Now you can generate a unique URL for each block. Clicking on that link will lead a user to that particular block. Note that this functionality works for both new and existing users.

Here are some of the ways you can use this function:

Link from a Facebook ad direct to the block with goods your bot sells.

Add special experiences in your bot. A Christmas promo perhaps?

Track sources of your users.

Note that parameter from the link is being saved to {{ref}} variable, so you can use this information in other blocks and broadcasting segmentation.

Analyze and improve your broadcasts

Hail the broadcasting history and statistics! New features allow you to play with content, buttons, time, segmentation to find a combination that suits your needs and drives user engagement.

Also we’ve made broadcast management a bit easier – you can now view the content of each sent broadcast, and clone “Send Now” broadcasts.

The wait is over! You can now accept payments in Messenger via a native Buy Button in your bots. Also, we have released “Set Up a Variable” plugin, Quick Replies in broadcasting, and the ability to search through AI rules.

Native payments

Hurray! From now on US users can accept payments via native Messenger interface. Try to create a Buy Button in any gallery. Native payments are perfect for creating neat ecommerce experiences – whether for a small online shop, a boutique apparel store, or an event tickets vendor.

Set Up a Variable plugin

Good news – with this plugin you receive more flexibility applying segmentation to users — not only by using Quick Reply buttons, but in any part of the bot flow.

For example, you can now update a variable with user’s preferences based on the blocks they visited.

Search through AI rules

Navigation through dozens and thousands of AI rules is easy now.

Just type any phrase in the search window, and you will see all the rules containing the phrase.

Moreover, if you need to copy-paste possible user phrases from, for example, Excel, you can do it in a single copy-paste.

Postbacks, quick replies and user variables in JSON plugin

We’ve covered almost all known cases regarding JSON plugin. Now you can make deep and powerful integrations. For example, you can make a JSON that searches rooms available for booking. Then, after clicking on a particular room’s Book button, your server will get new request for booking, with this room’s ID. The answer will then be rendered to the user.

Last month we built our first chatbot using Chatfuel, as our way of testing the platform. Since we considered it an elaborate test, we wanted to build something fun and enjoyable, to attract as many people as possible. As huge fans of Game of Thrones, we made a survival bot that had you go through the 6th season, with a pinch humor. We decided to call it GOTSurvival.

Over the past few months, I invested heavily into the bots space. I founded an agency in Vienna called Bot Manufaktur, specialized in building bots for Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Slack. At one point, I couldn’t help but notice a gap in the market: A lot of people were playing around with bots, but the learning curve was extremely steep, so I analyzed the market to find the easiest and at the same time most sophisticated solution which happened to be Chatfuel.

That’s why I decided to record my very own online course on how to create a chatbot using Chatfuel, available on Udemy and Skillshare using Chatfuel. A few months and over 2,000 subscribers later, I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience with the community, in the hopes of inspiring you to start your own business in the emerging bots industry. I started teaching on Udemy over a year ago and have built up an audience of over 10,000 students since then. Most of my students come from Australia, Egypt, the United States, and India. The way I approached the problem was to create online courses where through which I could personally offer real value and choose topics that were not overrepresented. I was basically looking to create niche courses.